“The blog post announcing the shutdown was done one day early. The idea was to take the opportunity of the new Pope being announced and Andy Rubin being replaced as head of Android, so that the Reader news may be drowned out. PR didn't apparently realize that the kinds of people that care about the other two events (especially the Pope) are not the same kind of people that care about Reader, so it didn't work.”
Tinkering around with my #raspberrypi#dietpi server, I find myself with a bit of nostalgia after setting up #freshrss. I was a big fan of #googlereader what seems a lifetime ago. I can't seem to see how the web overall has changed for the better since then, but it is a breath of fresh air.
So is there actually a good #RSS reader, ideally an online one but certainly one with linux support, out there these days ?
I think I may need to start building up a good feed again. I kind of stopped back when #GoogleReader got killed, but my time on #Mastodon has got me thinking that was a mistake.
I know people say that the death of #GoogleReader killed the RSS (or something) but when the Reader died I just moved on to other services like Feedly. I have been using #RSS since the 2000s and never stopped 🤷
I remember in the early days Twitter had RSS #feeds for almost any aspect of its site, including feeds for specific searches. This feature no longer exists.
10 years ago #GoogleReader was shut down. A product that is still missed all those years later. It was a great product. Heck, it would be one even today. That decision changed how people saw Google. It was the turning point.
Who killed Google Reader? Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been
Back when it still existed at all. Google’s feed-reading tool offered a powerful way to curate and read the internet and was beloved by its users. Reader launched in 2005, right as the blogging era went mainstream; it made a suddenly huge and sprawling web fe ...continues
Ten years since #GoogleReader was killed in order to clear the path for Vic Gundotra to burn literally billions of dollars creating a social network with fewer active daily users than LiveJournal. (And not LiveJournal at its peak. LiveJournal in 2014.)
My favorite memory of once giving a small talk at the Google campus in 2012 was at the end someone asked me what my favorite Google product was and I said Reader, by leaps and bounds that it was a key part of my day on par with Gmail.
Everyone’s face dropped in the room and then my host said “Have you tried Google+? Anything you like about that?”
@mathowie We should never have given Google the power to do that. #blogging, like the fediverse, is meant to be decentralised, and allowing one dominant player to emerge on the client side was a malfunction.
There are still many good feed readers out there, like @Inoreader .
(p.s. I was an avid #GoogleReader user myself, and share in the blame.)
(Could we say that given the low info density, flat design superficiality of everything that came later, Reader’s shutdown marked the death of “Web 2.0”?)
I was at Google at the time and recall my own and other Googlers’ disappointment
Perhaps the biggest disappointment though is how everyone seems to have understood the death of Reader as the death of feeds
Feeds aren’t dead, but we lost a decade bringing them to people
@Gargron in my opinion that was the best move for innovation. Without killing #GoogleReader we would still be in Googles ecosystem. Now we have a variety of #RSSreaders to choose from.
So I would argue that not only the shutdown of #GoogleReader was the primary cause for the #RSS demise, but also this was actually intentional, to wipe out from the general consciousness the awareness of the possibility and existence of decentralized, user-controlled forms of content distribution.
Several users have also remarked that RSS and #Atom feeds still exist, citing podcasts as primary application (in fact, it could be argued that it's not a podcast if it's not available via RSS).
This is hilarious. A #Google engineer invented #zx to make command line scripting easier with #NodeJS, because at a certain point #shell scripts get too complicated and you need a Real #Programming Language.
This is exactly #Perl’s use case from thirty-six years ago. But the kids want #JavaScript everywhere and would rather it take more work to convert their ascended #Bash scripts to a vastly different syntax.